Author Team

Jill de Villiers is a Professor Emerita at Smith College in Psychology and Philosophy. Though she trained in Experimental Psychology at Harvard, her work has also contributed to Linguistics by testing theoretical ideas with experimental work with children. Dr. de Villiers’ specialty is language acquisition, including several books on language acquisition as well as over a hundred articles on many varied topics within the field. She has an abiding interest in the path that preschool children take to learn complex grammar, and its relationship to “theory of mind”, namely how children understand what other people know, think, believe and feel. She has designed language assessments in several languages, and is passionate about inventing interesting interventions for children having problems. She has lectured and given week-long workshops on language acquisition and assessment all over the world, including Brazil, Japan, China, France, Germany, Spain, South Africa, the Netherlands, Uzbekistan and the UK.

Tom Roeper is a linguist at UMass who works in the generative tradition both at the theoretical and experimental level. Over the past 50 years his primary focus has been articulating both the theory and facts to give us an understanding of the acquisition path as part of Universal grammar, exploring phenomena like recursion and movement. His extensive cross-linguistic work falls within the larger quest to explore the foundations and implications of Cognitive Science. These projects have led to applied work in Communication Disorders, second language acquisition, and heritage languages. He contributed to the DELV assessment that seeks to respect dialect variation, especially African-American English, in evaluation of disorders. He also pursues the pedagogical implications for education about grammar and in second language acquisition. His goal is to discover how we can directly apply experimental insights in nursery and elementary curricula, as well as enriching our language interactions with children.

A lifelong New Englander, Salem is an alum of the Massachusetts College of Art*. His portfolio includes work with many educational institutions, collaborating with organizations such as Temple University, Wellesley College and Smith, as well as creating a brand identity and characters for the Active Playful Learning project in conjunction with The LEGO Foundation. His other work includes illustrating for Retronauts, Limited Run Games and Hyperion Books. His favorite, however, has been illustrating the basset hound Rumpole for the Doctor Ophelia series. Salem can often be found drawing on an iPad at various coffee shops around the Boston area.

*where he – true story – learned how to be a professional wrestler.